Charles L. Mee, Jr.: The Genius of the People. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, September 30, 1987.

 

To take the profuse, complex details of past events and build a readable narrative with them: popular history is easy to do, hard to do well. Prey to partisanship and pedantry of all kinds, the 1787 Constitutional Convention is no exception. Charles L. Mee, Jr. has a knack for this kind of writing, as he shows here. If accompanied with a few caveats, his book should make a timely gift for the non-scholar (or young student) who wants to know something about what this Bicentennial-of-the-Constitution stuff is all about.

“The genius of the people” alludes to an assertion of Publius in The Federalist: that only the republican form of government fits “the genius”—that is, the character and situation—”of the American people.” By establishing that form, the United States Constitution reflects our people but is not simply a product of them. Publius does not suggest that we are geniuses in the romantic sense of the word prevalent today; he presupposes decent virtues and ordinary intelligence, both exercised in liberty. But the framing of the Constitution did require exceptional intelligence and virtue of a certain kind, best summarized in the word ‘prudence.’

Mee more or less understands this. He rejects the once-fashionable contention of reductionist historians, that the Framers merely played for personal and regional economic advantage. Their motives, complicated and various, do not fit any simple pattern. There was James Madison, concerned with balancing central and local governments, uniform national laws with liberty. There was George Washington, convinced that the new country’s economic well-being and military strength depended upon a strong central government. There was Benjamin Franklin, optimistic, more ‘democratic’ than Washington, less troubled by such disorders as Shay’s Rebellion. There was George Mason, advocate of strong local government, a detester of politics, distrustful of politicians, who therefore determined to keep the federal government modestly empowered. Mee writes vivid, telling political character sketches of these and the other principal Framers that form the best section of the book.

Mee remarks one extraordinary similarity among these diverse, quarrelsome men. They were gentlemen, in the old way. All agreed not to report any of the Convention’s secret proceedings to the public. Except for the garrulous Franklin, who gossiped among friends, none did—proof that the Framers held prudence and honor above popularity and transient advantage. “The newspapers knew nothing,” and as a result, serious candid deliberations could occur, and did.

Virginia’s delegation put the serous set of proposals before the Convention. Written by Madison, the Virginia Plan called for a strong national government dominated by the large states. Mee recounts Madison’s argument in defense of enlarging the sphere of government: that a federal republic extending over a large territory and substantial population will make it harder for any one faction to dominate the others, thereby controlling the worst effects of faction. But he gives Madison an egalitarian twist, summarizing his claim to be, “The answer to the problems of democracy was more democracy.” This seriously distorts the argument of the tenth Federalist, which calls not for more democracy, more direct popular rule, but a more extensive republic, or representative government. Mees has replaced Madison’s argument with a phrase from the twentieth-century egalitarian philosopher John Dewey, a ‘progressive’ who regarded the United States Constitution as inadequate to the needs of modern life, and who sought to combine increased direct democracy with a bureaucratic welfare state. Madison wanted not “more” democracy but a republic capable of restraining the typical excesses of democracy.

The local-power or states-rights men were not to be overawed by the Virginia gentry. Mee narrates the debate, and much of what one can know or guess about the bargaining after hours, with accuracy and verve. “Thoroughly practiced in political realism,” the Framers were “neither naïve nor cynical”; the centralist and localist factions “could not be neatly divided along lines of wealth or class.” These were political men, not economic ones. Their final compromises—basing the House of Representatives on population, the Senate on equal representation of the states—demonstrated this prudence. Madison opposed the compromise (which Franklin wrote) making him “the Father of the Constitution” in a strict and traditional sense: initiating, contributing significantly to its genetic makeup, and helping to ensure its care, but not to be credited with the whole baby.

The book should be read with a few caveats. Mee has a weakness for polemical jabs directly more at the political situation of 1987 than 1787. Thus we learn of his opposition to “secret wars” and of his enthusiasm for gun control. He sometimes lets his sentiments outrun his evidence, as when claiming that Madison’s Senate was for the rich, his House of Representatives for the middle class, and that “the poor would have to hope, as always, that government pledged to justice did not mean to risk the foundation of justice by restricting it to the few.” But in 1787, 1987, and every year in between, the middle class and not the poor has comprised the majority of Americans; if the House is the seat of the middle class, then government has never been restricted to the few.

More seriously, Mee claims that the great defense of the new Constitution, The Federalist, “promotes a conception of the Constitution that is… more aristocratic than the consensus of those who actually wrote the document.” However, he almost immediately concedes that The Federalist “gave partisans of the Constitution the best arguments they could use in favor of the new plan.” That being the case, then the more “aristocratic” conception must be superior to the democratic one. The most intelligent critique of interpretations of the Constitution in accordance with the Framers’ “original intent” would be that the document is better than the intent.

Instead, Mee trots out a much worse, though more common, argument. Because the “Great Compromise” between large and small states was a compromise, he denies that any original intention can be found in the Constitution at all. This of course makes no sense. If two people argue and reach a genuine compromise, each comes away with a new, shared intention. The debate over original intent involves some complex issues, and cannot be so simply dismissed as ‘progressive’ partisans of “judicial activism” would like to do.

The Genius of the People nonetheless serves the intention of its author, who provides a readable account of the single most important event in the course of events in America. Scholars will learn nothing from the book, but they are not its audience. Non-scholars can do worse than to read a book of this sort, especially if they read with that typically American skeptic’s eye.

Richard B. Bernstein (with Kym S. Rice): Are We to Be a Nation? The Making of the Constitution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, December 16, 1987.

 

Published by Harvard University Press, underwritten by the New York Public Library, recommended by Henry Steele Commager (“the dean of American historians,” as he is often billed), this handsome coffee-table volume marking the bicentennial anniversary of the United States Constitution can be safely assumed to represent the views of America’s academic establishment. As it does, for better and for worse.

For better, the establishment no longer subscribes to the crude economic determinism of Charles Beard. Writing in the 1930s, that celebrated ‘progressive’ historian aimed to ‘debunk’ the Constitution by claiming the framers acted in accordance with their own financial interests. His claim fit well with the temper of the American Left at the time, led by a U. S. president who decried ‘economic royalists’ on Wall Street. Professor Forrest McDonald disproved this claim some thirty years ago, carefully researching those interests and contrasting them with the arguments made on the floor of the Constitutional Convention. Insofar as the framers defended economic interests, these were more regional than personal; politics not corruption was their fame, played hard but honorably.

Bernstein respects the integrity and intelligence of the framers. He calls the Constitution the culmination of the intellectual ferment and political experimentation in the new republic.” As befits a historian, he does better at describing politics than at understanding political philosophy.

He rightly notices that the Declaration of Independence speaks of the American people, not the people of Massachusetts, Virginia, New York; Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues thereby “nationalized the case against George III.” Bernstein does not adequately connect the principles, as distinguished from the “nationalism,” of the Declaration of the Constitution, despite the Declaration’s clear statement that governments are instituted among men for the purpose of securing their unalienable rights—a point unlikely to have slipped from the minds of the framers. In this oversight too he follows contemporary scholarship.

Bernstein knows that “In the era of the American Revolution, more than at any other time in our history, ideas dominated our politics.” This fact even leads to a small and amusing design problem: Many of the book’s numerous plates depict nothing more visually striking than old book and pamphlet covers. Unfortunately, Bernstein endorses the regnant historicist or ‘contextualist’ interpretation of those ideas, an interpretation promoted by such scholars as J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner. This school exaggerates the effect of ‘the times’ on great political thinkers and statesmen, overlooking the fact that such individuals themselves form a large part of what we mean when we look back at ‘the times.’ Too much attention paid to ‘context’ typically causes inadequate attention to ‘texts,’ a failure to read the writings of political thinkers with sufficient care, and therefore to judge the actions of thoughtful statesmen who did read with care.

Specifically, Bernstein calls Montesquieu’s magisterial The Spirit of the Laws a “disorganized, rambling treatise,” which it demonstrably is not. He fails to see that while the principal framers rejected Montesquieu’s preliminary argument on the impossibility of maintaining a republic in an extensive territory, they accepted his final argument for an extended commercial republic. Following Pocock, Bernstein claims that “at the heart of republican thought was a deep concern with public virtue and an obsession with corruption,” oversimplifying The Federalist‘s argument, wherein civic virtue combines with representative and federal institutions, the extended territory those institutions make possible, and the practical spirit of agriculture and commerce to temper impolitic popular enthusiasms. Published work by Professor Paul Eidelberg, particularly his 1974 book, A Discourse on Statesmanship: The Design and Transformation of the American Polity, provides a subtler and more accurate assessment of the framers’ achievement.

Bernstein’s failure to see the Constitutional significance of the Declaration of Independence, along with his superficial account of the Constitutional order itself, issue in an inaccurate conclusion: That Hamilton’s preference for commercial life and Madison’s preference for agricultural life, reflected in the dispute between northern and southern states at the Convention, eventuated in the severest crisis the American regime has faced, the Civil War. In fact, the Civil War had little to do with issues between financial men and farmer, and everything to do with slavery. Both Hamilton and Madison opposed slavery, although Madison (himself a slaveholder) could never think of a way to divest himself, or his fellow Virginians, of their ‘property.’

The dispute between Madison and Hamilton centered on politics, not economics. Madison suspected Hamilton, and the Federalist Party generally, of harboring oligarchic ambitions against republicanism itself. Madison expected and wanted commerce to thrive in the United States, but wanted only such commercial activities as in his judgment fostered virtues of industry and honesty similar to those of the agrarian way of life. Far from simply identifying himself with southern agricultural interests, Madison recognized that chattel slavery made white southern gentry into aristocrats, not good republican citizens. These regime-threatening tensions, not the normal and manageable strains between town and country—characteristic of the extensive, diverse republic Madison himself lauded in the tenth Federalist—led to “the crisis of the house divided.

 

Henry Adams: History of the United States of America during the Administrations of James Madison. New York: The Library of America, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, April 8, 1987.

 

‘Leadership’ obsesses political commentators today. Strong leadership is good, weak bad. ‘History’ is said to be going somewhere, and leaders are to take us there, quickly and efficiently.

But leadership is not statesmanship. A statesman may lead; he may also follow, or seem to. More than that, he cultivates. He cultivates the character and circumstances of citizens, with a view to a particular achievement of the human good.

Henry Adams’s history of James Madison’s presidency shows us an unusually intelligent, careful historian who is also a historicist—one who believes that ‘History’ wholly encompasses individuals—as he tries to assess a statesman who was no historicist. Adams exercises his considerable wit by turns sneering at leader-worship and deriding inept leaders. He overlooks statesmanship.

Adams wants to do justice to Madison: “always a dangerous enemy, gifted with a quality of persistence singularly sure in its results,” Madison “rarely failed to destroy when he struck.” But Adams’s judgment of Madison, and of what constitutes doing justice to him, is low. He complains of the “colorless character” of Madison’s oratory, while conceding it was “intended to disarm criticism,” not to quicken some historian’s pulse. A poor administrator, “never showing great power as a popular leader,” Madison lacked la grande passion . For that reason, Adams, devotee of force, falls rather out of patience with “this circumspect citizen”—who, unaccountably by Adams’s lights, “paid surprisingly little regard to rules of consistency or caution” when pursuing some “object which seemed to him proper in itself.”

Completed in 1891, the full, nine-volume History spans the administrations of Jefferson and Madison. There can be no question: It remains the most gracefully written, scrupulous, and penetrating major history ever written by an American. Adams shows how the Jeffersonians won resounding victories against the Federalist Party, then gradually adopted Federalist principles in practice. What began as a movement for states’ rights, ended by strengthening the Federal government. Adams takes this to illustrate the historicist thesis, that social and economic forces finally overwhelm the intentions of statesmen, and that historians therefore should study not individuals so much as society, in “the same spirit and by the same methods” as other scientists study “the formation of a crystal.”

In Jefferson’s case, Adams may well be right. All his life, Jefferson condemned centralized government, yet his Louisiana Purchase was a Hamiltonian exercise of presidential power at the service of (sound) geopolitical calculation if ever there was one. Madison, however, presents a more complex problem.

After all, Madison had collaborated with Alexander Hamilton years before, writing the two most important essays in The Federalist. His conduct throughout the 1787 Constitutional Convention promoted energetic national government and vigorous commerce—the bonds of union, not of ‘states’ rights.’

By the year 1809, when he succeeded Jefferson in the White House, Madison had of course publicly associated himself with Jeffersonian doctrines. How strongly did he believe them? If Jefferson could prudently relax his doctrinal muscles, the better to catch Louisiana, might not the circumspect Mr. Madison permit himself even less partisan dogmatism?

Eight years of Jeffersonianism had left the War Department in a shambles and the Treasury almost bankrupt. Mediocrities peopled both Congress and the Executive branch. Madison at first did little, and perhaps could do little, to resist the decline. Adams suggests that by 1811 the federal union itself was in jeopardy.

Madison “did not want a distinct issue of peace or war with England,” which had been harrying American shipping and impressing our sailors. He pursued a policy of “peaceful coercion”—commercial restrictions of English trade—so that American commerce could develop its own strength at its own pace. The English didn’t cooperate, and the War of 1812 began with the American Army guided by generals who combined the exhaustion of old age with the ill judgment of inexperience in war.

“The process by which a scattered democracy decided its own will, in a matter so serious as a great and perhaps fatal war, was new to the world; bystanders were surprised and amused at the simplicity with which the people disputed plans of war and peace, giving many months of warning and exact information to the enemy, while they showed no signs of leadership, discipline, or union, or even a consciousness that such qualities were needed.” The United States may have been the first nation in history “to hope that the war itself might create the spirit they lacked.”

Madison prosecuted the war energetically. The spikes of Adams’s criticism cannot quite puncture the statesman’s tough hide: “If a strong government was desired, any foreign war, without regard to its object, might be good policy, if not good morals, and in that sense President Madison’s war was the boldest and most successful of all experiments in American statesmanship, though it was also among the most reckless.” Because strong government was Federalist Party doctrine, not Jefferson’s, Adams doubts that Madison had this in mind. But Madison had read his Montesquieu, and had lived through the Revolutionary War. He knew war’s centralizing tendency, could not have been so naïve as to suppose America to be exempt from it, and, while perhaps not intending war, did not abase himself in order to avert it. When it occurred, he put it to use.

The first two years of conflict actually weakened national unity, bringing the Anglophile Federalists of New England one step away from secession. But “little by little the pressure of necessity compelled Congress and the country to follow Madison’s lead.” He sent his best men to negotiate a peace treaty with England, and they did–after battlefield events convinced the British government to accept reasonable terms.

Madison underlined the lesson in his 1815 Message to Congress: “Experience has taught us that neither the pacific dispositions of the American people, nor the pacific character of their political institutions, can altogether exempt them from that strife which appears, beyond the ordinary lot of nations, to be incident to the actual period of the world”—the period of the Napoleonic Wars. “Experience demonstrates that a certain preparation for war is not only indispensable to avert disasters in the onset, but affords the best security for the continuance of peace.” And the preparation for war that secures peace requires a strong federal government.

Madison had known these truisms twenty-five years before the War of 1812. Had he forgotten them in the 1800s, only to relearn them as president?

It is more plausible to think that this quiet little man, “always treated by his associates with a shade of contempt as a closet politician,” more theorist than man of affairs, waited for years, with a farmer’ vigilant patience, for the seeds of 1787 to mature into the harvest of 1815. Then peace and prosperity” “put an end to faction.” In 1787, James Madison had predicted the diminution of faction’s effects, if not its “end,” thanks precisely to the soothing effects of peaceful commerce, prospering under the aegis of Constitutional union. By then, experience had taught Americans lessons that Madison and the other Founders arranged for our political conditions to teach.

And it may be that the resolutely unheroic Mr. Madison moved unobtrusively among such forceful men as Hamilton and Jefferson, allowing them to use him, the better to use them, in rather the same way Madison’s Constitution invites us to use it, pursuing our own purposes but bending them to our own good. Henry Adams admires force, albeit with a touch of irony. James Madison understood force, and used it for the good of his country. His “new science of politics” excels Adams’s newer science of history, because it is a genuine science, one that never confuses men with crystals.

 

2017 Note:
For the last decade, Robert Eden of the Hillsdale College Politics Department has been preparing a study of Adams’s History in which he will argue that Adams himself partook of a sort of literary statesmanship that featured exactly the sort of prudent indirection Madison practiced in politics. I happily expect to ‘stand corrected’ by Bob’s interpretation, as it should raise Henry Adams even higher than before, to or even in a sense above the level of the great men he studied.